During a considerable part of the twentieth century we were steeped in the assurance of faith, which told us that “faith” was a form of human cognition that belonged to humanity’s past, and that this faith has made us believe that religion was also a human institution that belonged in that same past.
The belief in “evolutionism” does not leave much doubt about these questions. Yet in the last quarter of the twentieth century a social and cultural hurricane made our religious certainties fall to the ground. Religious feelings and manifestations increasingly appeared in the public sphere and religions experienced great expansion worldwide.
This new phenomenon places us before a new model of understanding about religion, a model that we can initially call post-enlightenment/positivist.
José Casanova refers to this phenomenon as the end of utopianism, i.e., the collapse of the era of Enlightenment beliefs (CASANOVA, 2000). The expectations and analysis which awaited the disappearance of religion, or even only its weakness, were not confirmed in history, leading us to rethink the role that religion and religious disposition plays in human society and human experience in general.
We can compare the transformation of the understanding of religion which has occurred in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century with what happened before in relation to the understanding of sexuality during the twentieth century.
For a long time certain religious and philosophical traditions have believed that sexual pleasure could be excluded (overcome) from human experience and the moralism of the Victorian era may be viewed as an excellent example of this. However, from an analytical standpoint, the advent of psychology, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis, has reversed this situation.
This analytical rupture ushered in the belief (or realization) that sex and sexual pleasure are compelling forces of life, and that we should not entertain the
22 illusion that these can be excluded from life, but must instead be understood for an improved quality of life.
In the case of religion something very similar happened. The new wave of religious expansion has destroyed the illusion that we could eliminate the religion of life in society, which had put us in the position of looking at the religious disposition towards life as a universal feature of human experience.
In the sphere of analysis, this transformation is confirmed, also starting with psychology. Just as Freudian psychology has contributed to revise the interpretation of the role of sex in human life, Jungian psychology has also markedly contributed to a post-Enlightenment review of the idea of religion. In a 1939 publication on Western psychology and religion (JUNG, 1995), Jung examines the repression of human religious dispositions in the modern West, empirically demonstrating the dramas of one of his patients in relation to his own religious feelings. At that time (1939) Jung had already “anticipated” a criticism that would appear years later in the general discussion and interpretation about religion (JUNG, 1995).
In other words, we can say that the need for transcendence is also something inevitable in the human experience (LUCKMANN, 2002), at least from a historical interpretation, and we must look at religion from this new point of view.
Still on the analytical changes about religion, we must not fail to note the context of political interests in which these ideas about obsolete role of religion in history and therefore its disappearance were created. At that time, religion was to some extent a fundamental pillar of support of the “Ancien Régime”, so the fall of this “regime” certainly was dependent on the attack against the legitimacy of religion and its subsequent power.
Such attack did not only occur in more explicit political struggles, but in a general criticism as well. Beyond the direct political attacks that have appeared in striking the anti-clericalism of the Enlightenment, especially in the work of Voltaire, a broad critique of religious cognition has emerged. With regard to the latter, it would mean that religious cognition would be replaced by new scientific reason.
23 Thus, the new ideas and political forces that emerged in the world have created a kind of interpretation of the religion that did not make more sense in the current political context, and also contained some analytical mistakes. This means that the dispute by imposing a new order of power in the world today does not necessarily pass through attack against the legitimacy of religion and direct confrontation against the power of religion as such.
This is the general panorama of analysis and understanding of religion which any investigation about religion must assume, which obviously includes this dissertation. Thus it would not be prudent to imagine a time without religion, but to understand the role which religion plays in our lives in the current social and historical context.
Before entering the debate about the specific analytical transformations in the sociology of religion, it is still important to point out another structural transformation regarding religion that is not directly related to the beliefs of the Enlightenment. In this regard I refer to the new conditions of development of religion after the impact of the advance of globalization. To be more exact, I refer to the notion of deterritorialization of religion in the globalized age, as postulated by José Casanova (2000).
Casanova demonstrates that in the history of Western religion it has always been related to a specific territory, which meant a sacred space that has always functioned as a material anchor to sustain the symbolic sense of world that religion gave to men. In other words, religion is shown as a collective representation of “imaginary communities” in the words of the same author, and also had an imaginary space.
Since the notion of Christendom, what implies an idea of a large sacred Christian Empire with clear territorial borders, until the emergence of religious national States, religion in the West was always linked to an imaginary sacred space. However, with the separation of Church and State, the Churches lost their ties to an imaginary territory. The rise of globalization has thus served to intensify this process of deterritorialization, making the challenge to religions even greater.
24 The result of this process was the inevitable requirement that religions must adapt to the new age of globalization. The religions which had success in this new scene were those that recreated themselves as transnational religious forces, or in other words, in global religions (CASANOVA, 2000). In this new logic of religious expansion, the whole world became a potential parish, without being linked to a specific territory or special defined nation.
In the lines above I have briefly presented the general changes which have influenced how we have assigned the roles that religion plays today.
These structural changes described above are related to the cognitive (political and geographical questions that had an overwhelming impact on our comprehension of religion.